Heart

I have a tendency to have a crush on whatever woman I'm around at the moment, and it's much the same with the music I listen to. I may tell you that the female vocalist playing on the sound system at any given moment is the best ever...

But nobody and I mean nobody, sings like Ann Wilson.

This series on VH1 has had some great acts on it, but so far none has approached Heart and Friends. I say this only halfway through the show. If this post begins to seem disjointed, it's because I am distracted.

Good Lord. For women in their fifties these girls are still knockouts. Ann is what Greg Beck would call a "hug and chalk," but she still looks great and her performance absolutely knocks my socks off. Thirty years later I still get chills listening to her.

I first heard Heart in seventy-six, before the band became famous. I was hanging with a friend from work and he was playing Dreamboat Annie on the turntable. I remember it was an odd evening because he, for some reason, decided he wanted to "come out" to me that night. One minute he would tell me that he was gay, I would say that's cool, and then he would back up and say he was just kidding. This went on for a couple of hours until I finally told him that I didn't care if he was gay or not, in fact I preferred that he was because then I would know he wasn't competing with me for the girls. And, he was better looking than me.

But I was hooked on the music and bought a copy of the album.

I remember working for Heart in the early eighties and by eighty-three Ann was starting to approach maximum density. I saw her split her black leather pants on stage one night and back-up, up stage, to let a stagehand tape her crotch with black gaffer's tape. She completed that segment of the set and then went backstage to change clothes.

Other than the "classic rock" stations, Heart pretty much fell off the face of the earth in the nineties. But I can't recommend this VH1 special enough. The only thing that would make it better would be to keep the camera plastered on Nancy. 'Specially if she was nekkid...